Corruption A Way Of Life For Liberians

June 10, 1990|By Howard Witt, Chicago Tribune.

MONROVIA, LIBERIA — There are many countries in the world where a high-minded constitution is not worth the paper it is printed on, but probably only in Liberia do government officials try to make a buck on it.

The constitution of the Republic of Liberia is an impressive document that guarantees Liberians all the rights and freedoms Americans take for granted. The officials at the Ministry of Information will happily sell you a copy for about $10.

They are not supposed to sell the constitution, the cover of which features the motto of the nation founded by freed American slaves in 1822:

``The love of liberty brought us here.`` So it`s not clear who keeps the money other than the officials themselves.

Corruption, graft and theft have become a way of life in this troubled West African country. The two men now fighting a brutal war for control, President Samuel Doe and rebel leader Charles Taylor, each are suspected of having stolen millions from the government.

Many dispirited Liberians wonder whether generations of greed have forever poisoned their land.

Liberian corruption starts before a visitor even enters the country. At the Liberian consulate in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, the visa officer greets foreigners with the eager salutation, ``Don`t you have something for me?``

The first word of Liberian English a visitor learns is ``dash,`` which is used as a noun and a verb. A dash is a bribe, and the only way to get around Liberia is to dash your way around.

The immigration officials at the airport often require a dash to get past the desk. The customs officers need to be dashed if you want all your bags.

At Monrovia`s best downtown hotel, the Ducor Palace, a dash is necessary if you want a refrigerator, a towel or a roll of toilet paper. The operators must be dashed for telephone calls after 6 p.m.

But all that is only the most superficial corruption.

The deeply ingrained, wholesale government graft that has sapped the country of its economic strength is mind-boggling even by Chicago standards-especially considering that Liberia has only about 2 million people.

Many of the country`s legislators are on the take, according to one of them. Favored cronies routinely get government contracts in exchange for kickbacks.

``The temptation to involve yourself in corruption is overwhelming,``

said the legislator, who feared having his name published.

Judges are widely thought to be crooked. Recently, the U.S. sought the extradition of a suspect from Liberia only to lose the case in court when the judge mysteriously ruled that no extradition treaty existed between the two countries.

There is, in fact, a functioning extradition treaty, and the Liberian government used it successfully against Taylor in the early 1980s when it sought his return from the U.S. to face charges of embezzling at least $900,000 when he was director of the government procurement agency.

Taylor escaped from an American jail before he could be extradited.

In the Liberian army, officers openly steal from their men, a practice that is proving to be particularly damaging to morale at a time when the soldiers are being asked to risk their lives fighting the rebels.

According to a senior government official, the officers disburse pay envelopes, and often they simply take half the salaries for themselves.

By far the most serious accusations throughout Liberia`s 168-year history have been directed at the office of the president. Until 1980 a succession of descendants from the original black American colonists monopolized Liberia`s wealth for themselves and occasionally dispensed it to the people in benevolent gestures.

Under the last two Americo-Liberian presidents, it was commonly said that for every $10 that came into the country, $2 actually went to the people.

In 1980, Doe, an 11th-grade dropout and army master sergeant, led a coup that was most notable for the scenes shown on international television of 13 Cabinet ministers being tied to stakes on a beach and executed.

Doe was the nation`s first purely indigenous president and promptly set about enriching his own oppressed tribesmen.

The U.S. poured hundreds of millions of dollars in economic and military aid into Liberia for the first six years of Doe`s regime, although there is hardly any evidence of where it all went.

Liberia`s hospitals and clinics have no medicines. The schools have few books. Nearly every building in Monrovia is crumbling. The bankrupt country has not been able to borrow funds from the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund for the last three years because it refuses to pay back $1.2 billion in foreign debt.

And last week, disappointed Liberian soccer fans found they would have to miss this year`s televised World Cup matches because the government did not pay its past-due satellite bills.

In 1988 the U.S. government, which has historically been Liberia`s major patron, grew concerned enough about fiscal mismanagement that it asked to send a team of financial experts to monitor every aspect of government spending.

Doe agreed and even gave the U.S. advisers the power to countersign every government check.

But after one year of what was to have been a two-year project, the U.S. advisers quit in disgust. They found that their eyes were shielded from about 30 percent of the government`s spending.

``The government just shifted all the funny stuff over to that 30 percent,`` said one American official.

Last January, Doe purchased a Boeing 707 jetliner for $20 million that diplomats say ought to have cost only about $7 million.

There are only two runways in the country where the jet can land, though it currently is stranded in London because the British crew hired to pilot it has quit.